Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest —Henry Adams

Getting educated is like getting measles; you have to go where the measles is —Abraham Flexner

He was like an empty bucket waiting to be filled [with knowledge] —William Diehl

He who teaches a child is like one who writes on paper; but he who teaches old people is like one who writes on blotted paper —The Talmud

Human beings, like plants, can be twisted into strange shapes if their training begins early enough and is vigilantly supervised. They will accept their deformation as the natural state of affairs and even take pride in it, as Chinese women once did in their crippled feet —Milton R. Sapirstein

Sapirstein, a psychologist, used this simile to introduce a discussion about the educational impulse and its relationship to the educational process.

If it [learning] lights upon the mind that is dull and heavy, like a crude and undigested mass it makes it duller and heavier, and chokes it up —Michel De Montaigne

Learning in old age is like writing on sand; learning in youth is like engraving on stone —Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back —Chinese proverb

Learning, like money, may be of so base a coin as to be utterly void of use —William Shenstone

Learning without thought is labor lost —Confucius

Many a scholar is like a cashier: he has the key to much money, but the money is not his —Ludwig Boerne

Modern education is a contradiction. It’s like a three-year-old kid with a computer in his hand who can multiply 10.6 per cent interest of $11,653, but doesn’t know if a dime is larger or smaller than a nickel —Erma Bombeck

The need of a teacher to believe now and again that she fosters genius is like the writer’s need to believe that he is one —Lael Tucker Wertenbaker

Rolling on like a great growing snowball through the vast field of medical knowledge —William James

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language: it is not everyone that can read in it —William Hazlitt

A scholar should be like a leather bottle, which admits no wind; like a deep garden bed, which retains its moisture; like a pitch-coated vessel, which preserves its wine; and like a sponge, which absorbs everything —The Talmud

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run —Mark Twain

Students are like acorns and oaks, there’s a lot more bark to the oak and a lot more nuttiness in the acorn —Anon

The teacher is like the candle which lights others in consuming itself —Giovanni Ruffini

Teachers, like actors, must drug themselves to be at their best —Delmore Schwartz

Teaching a class was in a way like making love. Sometimes he did it with great enthusiasm … sometimes he did it because it was expected of him, and he forced himself to go through the motions —Dan Wakefield

Teaching a fool is like gluing together a potsherd [pottery fragment] —The Holy Bible/Apocrypha

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town; every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal —Samuel Johnson

Johnson’s simile referred to his view of Scottish education.

To study and forget is like bearing children and burying them —The Talmud

To transmit wisdom to the unworthy is like throwing pearls before swine —Moses Ibn Ezra

Your education, like … carrots, is not a manufactured article, but just a seed which has grown up largely under nature’s friendly influence —William J. Long

Quotations"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet" [Aristophanes]"Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave" [Lord Henry Brougham speech to the House of Commons]"To live for a time close to great minds is the best education" [John Buchan Memory Hold the Door]"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another" [G.K. Chesterton]"'Tis education forms the common mind,""Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined" [Alexander Pope Epistles to Several Persons]"Education is something that tempers the young and consoles the old, gives wealth to the poor and adorns the rich" [Diogenes (The Cynic)]"Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten" [B.F. Skinner Education in 1984]"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul" [Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie]"When you educate a man you educate an individual; when you educate a woman you educate a whole family" [Charles D. McIver]"education: that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding" [Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary]"Man is the only creature which must be educated" [Immanuel Kant]

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